Tai Hang (Birthplace of the Fire Dragon Dance)

Cultural heritage

Tai Hang lies just south of Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island, originally a Hakka village where the fire dragon dance began in the 1880s to fight a plague and has continued for over a century. Today Tai Hang is an established urban neighbourhood, but each year around Mid-Autumn hundreds of men still raise a dragon studded with tens of thousands of incense sticks and carry it through these streets, fire and smoke bringing a century-old rite back to life, inscribed as a national ICH item in 2011.

Visiting: Visiting Tai Hang at Mid-Autumn, one sees the dragon set out from Lin Fa Temple and wind along Un Shing Street and its neighbours to deafening gongs and wreathing incense, the whole street turned into an open-air folk theatre; on ordinary days the lanes of small shops let one feel a community where the old Hakka village meets the modern city.